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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5756713" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with the last sentence. Turn-by-turn initiative isn't just an abstraction. And even if it were, there would be no inherent reason to treat the action economy as a PC rather than a player resource.But this isn't what Vicious Mockery has to be. If you read some traditional myths or fairy tales, Vicious Mockery - denouncing a person, or their lineage, or their honour, or their existence - and this having a real effect, is more verisimilitudinous than fireball or magic missile.Is this meant to mean that it's an objection to a fantasy RPG ruleset that it tends to produce fiction with a certain mythical dream quality?Personally that strikes me as very bizarre, and reinforces [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION]'s comment upthread - which he's said before - that "verisimilitude" in relation to D&D fantasy often means "fantasy by engineers for engineers".This is one way to design an RPG, but my point is that it's only one way, and a designer (like Monte) who assumes it is the only way will miss (or misunderstand) important features of 4e.The other way is that the rules are a support structure to help the participants agree on who gets to say how events in the game universe play out, and also perhaps provide constraints on that narration, but leave the details of how things play out free to be specified in accordance with those constraints plus broader considerations of genre, verisimilitude etc.This seems to imply, then, that "anti-magic" in 3E is as misdescribed as "healing" in 4e. Is that right?But that's fine. In 4e, the answer is "Play a fighter and take Passing Attack, Come and Get It, Footwork Lure, etc".The consequence of this is that someone who is in love with a wizard can have an inspiring dream of that person, but not someone who is in love with a fighter, or an ordinary person. In my view, that is breaks the verisimilitude of fantasy.It is also a problem that the dream becomes a consequence of Arwen deliberately casting a spell, when in fact there is no evidence either that (i) she is a spell caster at all, or (ii) the dream was the result of someone's deliberate decision (contrast Saruman trying to bring down the mountain).Yes. That is what page 42 is for. Diplomacy in lieu of Healing, but the DC would have to be higher, and perhaps also some adverse consequence like granting CA until the start of your next turn as you stop fighting to talk to your comrade.</blockquote>

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